


It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth

by orphan_account



Category: Life
Genre: F/M, New Year's Resolution Challenge, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-01-07
Updated: 2009-01-07
Packaged: 2017-10-03 15:59:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rachel tries to remember the fairy tale where everything the princess ever thought was a lie, but it all turned out okay in the end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Annakovsky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annakovsky/gifts).



Rachel is lying in his arms with her blood seeping through her fingers, fighting for consciousness. He smiles at her, warm and open and as though there isn't a problem in the world that can't be solved just by wishing it away, and the thought flashes through her head that she knows him.

She's lost a bit of blood by this point and as she looks up at him she begins to think that maybe this is her prince, her knight, and she knows him in the way that all princesses know the men on the white horses who come to save them. _I've come to be with you_, he says, brushing her hair away from her face, and Rachel decides right then and there that she's in love with him.

She drifts in and out and finds herself confused again, especially when other people start to arrive and the chaos makes her head hurt. Her prince steps away from her and as the paramedics move in she realizes she was wrong: he's not the prince, he's the witch, come disguised as a sweet old woman selling fruit. He's going to hurt her father. _He did this to me!_ she shouts, and it comes out feeble and shaky but it seems to do the trick.

She fades away again, dreaming of poisoned apples and a cursed corset that squeezes the life out of her.

\--

Rachel waits for the man she calls her father at the hospital, waits for him to come and hold her hand and tell her that everything is going to be okay. Because he's her family, he's all she's got, and if those men got to him...

The doctors dodge her questions - _where is he? who tried to kill me? why is this happening to me?_ \- and offer lame platitudes in response. She starts yelling, screaming, throwing anything she can get a hold of (plastic cups, syringes), until there are three sets of arms holding her down and a needle pricks the inside of her elbow.

When she wakes up again, groggy and cotton-headed, a uniformed cop is at the foot of her bed. _Rachel_, he says, smiling at her. _You're going to be fine. Everything is going to be okay._

But then he starts explaining, explaining everything. And his reassurances mean absolutely fucking nothing to her anymore, because the man she calls her dad is the same person who slaughtered her family and ruined her life, and the man she's spent over a decade hating and loathing and imagining brutal, unspeakable punishments for...saved her life.

Rachel doesn't realize she's climbed out of bed until she's in the bathroom and vomiting acid and hatred and fear and pain until her knees buckle and she's crumpled on the ground, her face pressed against the cool ceramic of the toilet.

As the nurse helps her back to bed, Rachel tries to remember the fairy tale where everything the princess ever thought was a lie, but it all turned out okay in the end.

\--

_When she was seven, Rachel announced to her mom that she was too old for Disney and fairy tales and princesses. She spent the next nine months reading nothing but Nancy Drew and the occasional Boxcar Children book. But when her brother turned six, her parents bought him a leather bound tome of Grimm's fairy tales. And she found herself wandering in to her brother's room at bed time to listen to the stories - dark and twisted, but also replete with fairy godmothers and happy endings._

When she was eleven, she found a similar volume at a used book store. She sat down right where she was and read the whole thing cover to cover, her fingers dancing over every faded illustration and weathered corner, as if she could brush over them and bring them to life.

\--

Days fade into weeks, and she tries to keep up with the men who keep moving her around, stuffing her into closets and cars and locking the doors, but she's finding it harder and harder to care about anything. And then he's there, gun in hand and light filtering around him like a halo as he stands in the doorway, and he's her knight in shining armor and her worst nightmare and before she knows it she's shaking like a leaf as he lifts her into his arms and carries her away.

She breathes in and breathes out and his arms tighten around her, and for a few minutes the screaming in her head quiets.

Charlie leaves her at another hospital of some sort - _I'll be back very, very soon, okay?_ \- and the distance and time and utter quiet allows her to sort through the jumble and chaos of her life, untangling the mess and looking for common threads. And when he comes back a day or three later, she's only untangled the knots up to the point in her life when he was still the man who killed her family in front of her.

He sits in front of her, his hands on his knees and his feet flat on the floor. He's calm, still, waiting for her to talk first, and she hates him, hates him, hates him.

He comes back the next day, and the week after that, and he lets her sit there and hate him, until the knots loosen again and she starts to remember that the pieces don't fit, and the man who killed her mother right in front of her had a mustache that Charlie definitely would never have been able to grow.

He brings Jen by, beautiful Aunt Jennifer, and she keeps pulling on those threads and doesn't hate him quite so much.

She starts talking again, and then she packs a bag and he drives her up into the hills to a house with a pool and a view and no furniture, and says that she can stay as long as she likes.

\--

There's no pattern to their lives. There isn't dinner every night, or a weekly movie marathon on Sunday evenings. Sometimes he goes running in the mornings, or Ted will swim twenty laps in the infinity pool, or she'll go out to the bars with a couple of friends and no intention of returning home that night.

The first time he brings a woman home she's sitting at the island in the kitchen, reading a dog-eared copy of _The Giver_. The door opens suddenly and he pours into the hall with a woman - a girl, she couldn't be more than a few years older than Rachel - on his arm. They're laughing in the way only drunk people can get away with, heads thrown back, arms wrapping loosely around each other, stumbling slightly towards the stairs.

He doesn't see her, doesn't realize he's not alone as he lets the woman lead him up the stairs, turning around to face him as she lets her hair down, slides one strap down her shoulder.

Charlie laughs, low and guttural, and grabs her to him. His fingers dig into her hair as he presses her against the banister. From her seat, Rachel can see his knee sliding between the woman's thighs, until she wraps her legs around his waist and he stumbles the rest of the way up the stairs.

Rachel sits silently for a few minutes, listening to the occasional giggle and the murmur of voices floating down the stairs. It takes a moment for her to realize that her pulse is racing and her mouth has gone dry, and rather than take the time to figure out just what the hell that means, she grabs her coat and purse and heads out the door.

She doesn't call her friends that night; instead, Rachel finds herself at a sports bar nearby, her skirt hitched around her waist as the random guy she just picked up fucks her in the men's room, her fingers clutching the sink and her eyes wide open so that she doesn't accidentally imagine it's someone else inside her.

\--

_The first time Rachel had sex she was fourteen years old. It was the year before Hollis came to find her, right around the time when she had reached the peak of her self-destructiveness (although not quite: the zenith would come two months later, with the overdose and the two nights spent on the run). She had been stoned - on what, she would never remember - and her nineteen year old foster brother had been lying next to her on the bed, his hand rubbing slow, lazy circles on her hip, then her leg, then her thigh, then..._

She didn't remember much about it. There would be other times for her reflect on.

\--

Like all things concerning Charlie, there's no pattern to his sex life. Weeks can go by with no tryst that she knows of, but then there was that stretch of five days where he brought home a different woman every night - and then capped it off with two on the last night.

On one occasion, when his flavor of the day is being particularly exuberant and reassuring - _yes, yes! You've got it, oh, that's so good, holy fuck yes!_ \- Rachel finds herself sitting on the island downstairs with a fork in the leftover apple crisp Jennifer had sent her home with. Footsteps alert her to Ted's presence, and she raises her eyebrows at him as he sits down to join her.

He shakes his head, laughing drily at the expression on her face and tells her about that one time with the three girls in the pool. At least he was keeping it to his bedroom now for the most part, Ted concedes.

_Because of me?_ Rachel wonders. _Does he think I don't know what he's doing up there?_

Ted shrugs. _Who knows. He still looks at you like a kid, you know._

Something curls tight in her stomach, and three mornings later Rachel emerges from her bedroom with a guy named Brad, who looks exactly like he's a guy named Brad. She escorts him downstairs and kisses him goodbye in the entrance hall, in full view of the kitchen. As the door shuts behind him, she turns to head upstairs without looking at Charlie, sitting silently at the island with a half-peeled orange in his hands.

She waits, wonders if he's going to say something to her. He never does. There's the one time when he calls her the morning after she stays at Theo's house, however. She's naked on the futon, the hipster strumming obliviously in the background, and she feels a thrill when she sees Charlie's name on the caller ID. _Where were you last night?_ he asks, and she knows that this is Ted asking after all. Charlie hears the guitar in the background and slips easily into his role as psuedo-guardian. _Put him on the phone_. She rolls her eyes and shoots him down and imagines in the back of her fucked up mind that he's jealous. _Does he know your uncle's a cop?_

A sick feeling settles in her stomach, because she's been playing out this scenario where they're dancing around each other and in this mess together, but in fact it's nothing more than...than what? A fucking schoolgirl crush?

_You are not my uncle,_ she says curtly as she hangs up the phone, right before standing up and sliding over to the boy on the couch. She drops the sheet and unbuttons his jeans expertly, and then she's straddling him and not not not picturing red hair and pale skin and scars she hasn't seen.

\--

It doesn't take a therapist to diagnose Rachel with a self-destruct instinct.

Brad and Theo are followed by (in rather quick succession) Mitch, Jesse, Paul and Brad #2. She still takes some twisted pleasure in parading her one night stands out the door in the glaring light of morning. After Paul, she saunters into the kitchen and picks an orange out of the bowl. Charlie is silent as she looks up at him and asks him about getting a couch and plasma television for the empty living room.

He contemplates the apple in his hand, a few bites taken out of it already. His lips purse, his fingers drum on the marble counter top, and finally he meets her eyes and lets out a breath._ Rachel, what are you doing?_

She's taken off-balance, surprised by the break in their code of silence. _What are you talking about?_

_The guys_, he says. _Do you even know them, or are you just picking them up every night?_

She narrows her eyes, pushes the stool back from the chair as she lets out a short, disbelieving laugh. Defensiveness is a layer she's comfortable in, as well-worn as an old pair of jeans. _I don't see how that's any of your business._

He wants to placate her, wants to take it back, but he's Charlie Crews and that's not in his toolbox. _I'm worried about you - _

_Don't be!_ she exclaims angrily. _I can take care of myself. I don't need a babysitter._ Offended self-righteousness is a familiar fallback of hers as well.

_I don't think you do,_ he insists, and the sharpness in his eyes gives her pause. _This is what people do when they care about each other._

And in theory Rachel knows that, but her family is dead and the man who raised her into adulthood is the one who killed them. And any reasonable person in her position would accept the love that Charlie wants to give her, because maybe he of everybody in the world can know something about who she's become.

But that self-destruct button is blinking red, and she has no idea how to ignore it.

_You shouldn't care about me. I don't care about you. _

\--

_When she was a junior in high school Hollis walked in on her and a boy named Sam. They weren't having sex, but her shirt was on the floor and a joint was sitting in an ashtray next to her bed as Sam's hand played beneath the waistband of her jeans. Hollis went pale and grabbed the guy by the back of his shirt, half-dragging him to the door._

Rachel stood in front of Hollis in her bra, indignant and infuriated. They yelled at each other, screaming obscenities (her) and about the fire of hell (him), until both voices went hoarse and faded away. She crossed her arms and glared at him as the anger seemed to fall from his shoulders, leaving him stooped and lined and ten years older.

He sighed. I want to keep you safe. I want to keep you whole.

_Her eyes burned, from rage or tears or just dust in the southern California air._ Too late.

\--

There are more women in the house, more women in his bed and in the pool and wandering out the door in the morning. She tries not to notice, but she can't help but keep a crazy, stalker, statistical accounting of his conquests, and there are definitely more of them.

She counters by inviting a guy with ten years on her and a wedding ring on his finger back to the house and fucking him in the pool. Her back scrapes against the rough edge and the water splashes around them. She sees a shadow move in the window and only then is she able to come, quietly gasping as her nails dig into the guy's back.

When the water settles she looks back to the window and sees nothing.

The women keep coming, and if more than once Rachel notices the ones with dark hair and pale skin and reads too much into it, she moves past it quickly. She refuses to analyze it when the brunettes start to outnumber the blondes, when tall and leggy gives way to more petite.

And she absolutely fucking _positively_ imagined it when she heard that one woman yelling at him for crying out the wrong name.

\--

Charlie comes home one afternoon and tells her that Ted's in jail. Parole violation, he says, explaining that it was a mistake without explaining anything else. _What kind of mistake?_ she demands to know, but he won't tell her more than that.

She's able to put some pieces together, though. _It's because of you, isn't it? It's because of Jack and you and whatever you've got locked up in that closet of yours._

He's taken aback by that, surprised that she's been able to figure out what she has, even though she knows nothing and it kills her.

_Yes._

_And you can't just let it go? You can't let everyone be?_

_No._ Charlie is nothing if not simply, painfully direct.

And she's angry -_ furious_ \- with him, with his zen and his calm and his unbelievable conviction in everything he does. Because he's supposed to be the good one of the two of them, the one who's been able to move on and be healed and healthy and whole, and if he's still locked up in that closet upstairs it means they're both fucked. Neither of them has a chance.

She doesn't realize that she's shouting at him, yelling and crying and hitting him, until he's got her wrists locked between them and his arm tight around her shoulders. _I'm sorry_, he whispers, his breath in her ear as she shudders against him, her fingers fisting in his shirt. _I'm sorry, I'm sorry I can't save you._

_You can_, she murmurs back, her words muffled against his chest. _Why can't you see it?_

Charlie's hand is no longer locking her wrists together; instead his fingers lace with hers as she frees one arm to twine around his waist. Rachel can feel the warmth of him everywhere - under her palm, against her cheek, his breath on her neck. Her fingers trace patterns on his back, his thumb strokes the back of her hand, and she looks up at him and he looks down and they're kissing, tongues and teeth and hands everywhere right there in the kitchen, right up against that damned island.

Her fingers scrabble with the buttons of his shirt, popping at least one off before the blue fabric is crumpled in a corner and her hands are under his white t-shirt, nails scraping against his back. His hands tighten on her waist as he sets her on the counter, sliding her ass right to the edge as her legs settle around his hips. His hands grip her thighs, and when his thumb presses into her crotch she breaks the kiss and gasps, breathless and in shock.

Charlie pauses, and she feels dread set in as she watches his rationalizations flash across his far-too readable face. Her eyes are shuttered, her lips drawn into an angry, resigned line before he even says it. _We - Rachel, we can't._

She nods curtly, refuses to meet his eyes. She can feel him hesitate briefly before stepping back and out of the kitchen.

Tears bite at her eyes, hot and angry and humiliated, and she hates him again. There's some comfort in coming back to that oh-so-familiar emotion of hers.

\--

_ Hollis traveled quite a bit for his missionary work, so to kill the time Rachel began to go running, for miles and miles every night. More often than not, she would run by the state penitentiary that was about ten miles from her house. She had no idea if this prison was the one that housed the infamous Charlie Crews, but she liked to imagine that it did. _

She would slow as she neared it, sometimes stopping altogether, and stand across the street from it's massive gray fences and walls. She would stare up at it and think about him, and imagine all the prison beatings and rapes and shankings he was hopefully receiving, somewhere in its depths. Then she would turn and finish her run, let the rage flow through her limbs into the pavement, until she reached her doorstep and didn't have to hate him anymore that night.

\--

A week of cold silence between them comes to a crashing end when he shoots his dad.

It had actually ended five minutes prior, when she heard the noise and called out for him and then he had his gun out and all she could think was _oh, god, don't you dare die._

But it's just his dad, and his chances of harming Charlie are even less once there's a bullet in his leg. And there are cops everywhere and there she is, Dani Reese. His gorgeous, fierce partner who has to be related to Jack Reese, because Rachel no longer believes in coincidences. And suddenly the tight little world she exists in with Charlie widens to include Dani, and she's having trouble breathing. _I've got to go_, she mutters, following the stretcher out the door.

\--

The next day she comes home and finds her bag packed, waiting in the hall at Charlie's feet. _It's time for you to go._

She doesn't say anything as he takes her to the car, as he explains about the threats, not until he hands her the tickets and money. _I don't want to go_, it spills out of her mouth and she refuses to regret saying it. She doesn't want to go. There is nowhere else.

They go back and forth, and Rachel knows she's on the losing end of the argument. Because she can talk about his bullet-ridden car and how they need to stick together, but he won't hear her.

_I don't care about some fucking gangster_, she says, more petulantly than she cares to admit. _It's not your job to keep me safe._

Charlie looks at her, surprised. _Of course it is_, he says as if it's the most obvious thing in the world. And she supposes it is, to him. Because his wife divorced him and the lawyer left and Ted is in jail and if he can't keep her safe, then he might as well just have stayed in prison for all the good he's doing.

_You and Hollis have a lot in common_, she says cruelly, watching his jaw tense and his fingers tighten around the steering wheel.

_How's that?_ His voice is utterly calm.

She snorts, staring out the window. _He thought I would be his redemption, too, didn't he?_

He doesn't know what to say to that. She watches several answers flash across his face, until he finally says _I don't have anything to redeem for. I was innocent, remember?_

Rachel continues looking out the window, her eyes tight. _So was I. Doesn't mean I feel any less guilty for surviving._

His voice is strained. _Rachel..._

_How long are we supposed to live in that night?_ she asks quietly.

Charlie exhales, long and utterly exhausted, and pulls over to the side of the road. He cuts the engine, and the sudden silence is horribly loud to her as she imagines she can hear his heartbeat.

_Rachel_, he says again.

_Don't send me away._

_I have to_. He grabs her hand, grips it tight as she continues to look out the window, seeing nothing.

She sees paths stretching out in front of her, leading in all directions. Love, death, normalcy, fear, nothingness.The enormity of it all comes crushing into her lungs, and she lets out a dry sob. Just one, just once, and then she's under control again.

His hand is still in hers as she climbs over the center console to straddle him. _What - _he starts to ask before she has her tongue in his mouth.

_Shut up_, she says against his lips, her hand reaching between them to palm his cock. He groans, burying the sound against her collarbone. It only takes a moment before he's participating, kissing her back and tugging her shirt up and over her head, running his lips along the line of her throat.

She rises up on her knees as he unbuckles her jeans, sliding the zipper down with unbearable slowness, his tongue playing in her bellybutton. At his cue she pushes off of him and he helps her tug the offending fabric off her legs as she splays awkwardly in the passenger seat. He leans over her, his fingers slipping through the leg of her panties as he kisses her again, silencing her gasp when his finger slides along her slit.

He touches her slowly, tortuously, until she bites his lip and pushes him up, following him back to the driver's seat to resume their original positions. A few quick adjustments and his belt's undone and his cock is out and she's sliding down down down - _ohhhh_. The sensation elicits a long, shuddering laugh from her lips, finally feeling him inside her. _Oh, fuck..._

It's Charlie's turn to silence her, his lips and teeth and tongue taking over as she moves on top of him, and after months of foreplay it doesn't take either of them very long to find release.

Neither is in a hurry to move afterwards. She presses her forehead to his shoulder, his arms loosely wrapped around her back as she traces lines on his chest. She kisses his throat, feeling his blood pulsing beneath her lips, and feels the last of the tension drain.

It isn't until ten minutes later, when they're dressed again and he's starting the car up, that she realizes nothing has changed.

_You're still sending me away._

He tries for zen, she can tell, but his face is tormented and his voice is hoarse. _I'm still sending you away._

And Rachel doesn't have the energy to fight him anymore. _Okay._

He drops her off at the curb, and there's a moment where Rachel contemplates kissing him good-bye. But nothing has changed and everything is about to, so she nods at him and grabs her bag and heads into the airport without a backwards glance.

The ticket he bought her is for Norway, included with a list of phone numbers and so much money it makes her head spin. She stands in the crowd for a moment, people streaming about her like water around an island, until she makes her decision. Making her way to the counter, she glances up at the board and picks a destination at random. Her ticket to Oslo is exchanged for one to St. Petersburg, and as she hitches her bag onto her shoulder and makes her way to security, she tosses the list of phone numbers into the trash along with her cell phone.

Three hours later, as they're calling her flight, Charlie Crews answers the door at his house and a shot rings out. His partner rushes to his side as he collapses, blood seeping through his shirt onto the hardwood floor. As Dani frantically calls for backup and an ambulance, Rachel settles into her seat, turns her iPod up and stares out the window as people settle in around her and engines rumble to life.

\--

_Rachel is six years old, chasing her little brother around their father's legs as he stands at the grill._ Rachel! _he admonishes,_ watch out! _She giggles, darting through his legs and after her brother._

Rachel! _her mother calls from the porch._ Come say hi to your Uncle Charlie and Aunt Jen.

_She squeals in excitement, racing into the house and plowing into them as they take off their coats._ Uncle Charlie! _she says happily, her arms twining around his legs._

Hey, Snow White, _he grins, lifting her up and squeezing her. _How's it going, kiddo?

_She smiles at him fondly, her Uncle Charlie with the red hair and crinkly eyes._ I'm going to marry my prince one day, _she announces, looking past him to Aunt Jen for approval. _

Jen smiles at her. Of course you are, _she says, pressing a kiss to Rachel's forehead._

Of course you are, _Charlie repeats,_ No one but a prince is going to deserve you.

_She nods, pressing a quick kiss to his cheek before jumping down and running out into the sun again._ 


End file.
